Aldo Tambellini
1930–2020 · Italian-American painter, sculptor and poet, pioneer of electronic intermedia
Aldo Tambellini (Syracuse, 1930 - Cambridge, 2020) was an Italian-American artist regarded as a pioneer of electronic intermedia. Besides painting, he worked as a sculptor and poet, and his output links painting with experimental film, poetry and audiovisual performance.
Born in New York, he spent his childhood in Lucca, Italy, where he studied at the local art institute. World War II shaped those years: his family survived the bombing of Lucca in 1944, and in the town of Guamo he lived alongside German soldiers and later African American troops who liberated it. At sixteen he moved to New York with his mother, and at seventeen he was already teaching painting at the Syracuse Museum.
After his training at Syracuse University, he studied in Oregon and at Notre Dame, where he worked on sculpture with Ivan Mestrovic and earned his MFA in 1959. In 1962 he co-founded Group Center, a collective mixing poetry, photography, choreography and film. From 1965 he painted directly on film, a technique he pioneered, which gave rise to his 'Black Film Series'. His film 'Black TV' won the Grand International Prize at the Oberhausen festival in 1969.
His electromedia performances, made with the poetry collective Umbra, combined hand-painted projections with dance, jazz and poetry. Black Zero, first staged in 1965, was revived in New York in 2009 and 2011 and at the Tate Tanks in 2012. Tambellini left a body of work that anticipated many later multimedia practices.